The Body and Society
For years historians thought Christianity introduced the idea of sexual repression to the unrepressed Romans. Turns out that’s not really true. At all. Peter Brown (history, Princeton) in his seminal work, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, surveys the history of sexual renunciation (continence, celibacy, and life-long virginity) in Late Antiquity, demonstrating elegantly that the world at the time was full of reciprocal influences and complicated discussions.
How the ancients used their bodies was connected with their responsibility to society. Since one in three women died in childbirth and as many men died in war, a couple had a civic responsibility to bear children. Forget ideas about ritual prostitution at Roman temples and 18th-century paintings with languishing girls ready to imitate Venus. All myth. The Romans highly valued “moderate and seemly sex.” So the shift that took place was not from freedom to repression, but rather a change in how people viewed the body itself. Christianity introduced an ideal that the body should be holy, freed from the grip of the animal world.
"It is impossible," he writes, "to sum up in so short a survey, and from such documents, the moral tone of a society as extensive, as diverse, and as little known to us in its day-to-day life as was the Roman Empire at its height. We are dealing with a society among whose upper classes areas of extreme rigidity coexisted with areas which immediately strike a modern reader as marked by a graciousness, a tolerance... The body was as different from the soul, and as intractable, as were women, slaves, and the opaque and restless populace of the cities" (26).
Brown, who at the time he wrote in the late 1980s was considered the preeminent master on the late antique world in the Mediterranean, includes the pagan, Jewish, and early church views of marriage and sexuality in the Roman world and how they influenced each other. Drawing on an encyclopedic knowledge of the five-hundred-year period from the rise of asceticism to the death of Augustine, he offers a sympathetic look that helps moderns like us “get inside the heads” of the ancient writers so we can understand without scoffing their views of the body and sexuality. If we could see the world as they did, we might not agree with their conclusions, but we could at least concede their views made sense.